Your Character's Name: Nolan
To most, the ten of us stalking a MPD caravan would have probably looked like a pack of wolves on the hunt; wild dogs circling, waiting for the perfect moment to swarm a crawling rundown junkie. Culler padded on all fours next to me, draped twice in black by her cloak and the moonless night. I could have mistaken her lithe crawl for a cloud’s shadow from mere feet, and twenty yards from us, the belching tractor-dragged convoy provided enough noise to drown out disagreement with a Horseman.
The boot-jockeys weren’t going to notice us.
“Everyone better keep their spacing. Bentz was too cocky today.” Culler spit the words at my shoulder without turning her head. Her eyes were locked on the tractor, but I could feel her mind spinning next to me.
“It’ll be fine, Culler.” I said.
“He’s getting reckless and you know it. He can’t break mission again. Not like he did today, and not with how jumpy the blues have been getting.”
“You know you told us it was absolute-silence until the charge goes?” She shot me a familiar don’t be a jackass look through her black hood. I knew that Bentz was on the other side of the tractor, crawling in the dark next to Bester, exactly where Culler’s plan had put him. He always was. She knew it too, but Brother Bentz had made a bit too much noise when he’d placed the charge in the tractor’s engine, and despite the two extra hours I’d spent on recon making sure Bentz’s mistake hadn’t been noticed, she was still riding him. Brother Culler was unforgiving about mistakes in her plans. She didn’t appreciate my levity. We stalked the caravan along the cracked roadway for a quarter of the night. Culler took heed of my reminder and stayed quiet as the engine rumble filled the empty night. The MPD liked to bring food and ammunition into their facilities during the light of day because they got held up the most. In the light, they could see trouble coming from farther. Night-shipments, then, were non-standard items they wanted to hide; tech-salvage; drugs; maybe some children to sell, if the Horsemen had been in an orphaning mood. Night-convoys would run without lights and have a few more gun hands running with them, and for the most part were left alone. We didn’t know what this particular tractor was hauling, and we never really did. Culler didn’t ask unnecessary questions when she took contracts for the brotherhood, and this time the “what” apparently hadn’t been important. Whatever it was, I liked the night-hits the best. They paid better. And they missed what we took. The paved highway narrowed to the width of two of the carts, and the eight guards widened their perimeter into the wispy grass around the road. Culler’s already silent breath halted, and a synchronized chill ran down my spine. All ten of us froze. We felt Bester’s thumb slide the safety off the detonator and press hard on the toggle. We smiled. Now, any pickpocket will tell you that he expects his plan to go wrong constantly; expecting individual parts of a plan to fail allows the whole to remain stable. Culler’s plans were frequently so redundant that two or three brothers could easily forget every single step and have no impact on the outcome. Any contract thief will tell you that he always expects his buyer to screw him and the target to know he’s coming. Any roadway hijacker will expect his mark to be packing hidden heat. Culler’s schemes could handle any of these surprises, so when the shaped charge didn’t detonate on cue, I didn’t panic. The next few seconds were chaotic. Floodlights erupted from the wagon trailing the tractor, turning anything within throwing distance into a glowing beacon of light. I got a nice silhouette of a new MPD heavy setting his machinegun on the railing facing me as the lights bloomed to full power. It took longer than I would have expected for the gunfire to start, maybe a few full seconds; Culler had time to shoot me a much less familiar, but equally distinguishable look. So this is probably it, huh? I covered my eyes with my hands, but they were already shriveled and useless. The first couple gunshots were towards our brothers on the opposite side of the road, and I pulled mightily on Culler’s tiny frame. The first bullet to tear through me went through my collarbone and splintered my shoulder blade, sending some bone fragments out my back. I think I dropped her. Once the cadence of fire picked up, I took four more shots in my legs and one in my stomach as I tried to pull Culler’s limp frame away from the small sun and it’s speedy lead rays. I think she’d been halfway through cursing Dex’s name when her neck tore open from a rifle shot. I thought she was dead, but that didn’t really matter at that point. As I blacked out, I think I tried to pull my pistol out of my jacket, but there’s nothing really definite about those last few moments.
The barkeep didn’t quite know what to say. This man had walked in, ordered his drink and sat for five hours before saying anything, and he hadn’t even told that story to anyone it particular. Now he sat quietly again, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Not exactly the usual type, either. His clothes were well-kept, and his jet black hair looked like it had been washed at some point. By looking, the barkeep had pegged his as the type to complain about his wife while nursing a beer. “Someone been tellin’ you stories, friend?” The barkeep spoke his first words to the man. He stared, unmoving, at the bar, cradling the glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched. “Telling stories?” His tone of voice was different now, as if he had been reading a script and suddenly was speaking out-of-character. “They’ll probably be stories when you tell them. Still memories for me.” “You got shot five times.” The barkeeper said skeptically. As a barkeeper, he took every tale of war and woe about as seriously as he took promises to “pay the tab next time”. His job was to nod, grumble in agreement, and refill the drinks. It didn’t usually matter to anyone how true the stories were. The steely-eyed patron seemed to disagree. He downed his drink in a single gulp and deftly unfastened his shirt, revealing a scar the size of a bottle cap on his collarbone. The barkeep knew a bullet scar when he saw one. He wondered what the mark on the other side looked like. “Hell, son, didn’t mean no disrespect. Scar like that’s worth a free drink. Bet that hurt, huh?” The freshly poured whiskey swirled calmly in the patron’s glass until it settled, marble smooth. He buttoned his shirt again. “Nothing too bad. I can get over the little stuff.” “So, uh, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened next?”
“…Pain, I guess.”
The blackness between the ambush and the Tombstone’s floor lasted as long as it took my shoulder to close from the rifle blast. It was dark, wet, and my body didn’t work at all; It took me a while to adjust to broken bones and clouded senses, but believe me, the pain hadn’t really started yet. Over a time I can’t really define, I learned from my brothers that two of our number had been killed instantly in the ambush. Five of my brothers laid in cells spread around the floor, including Culler, but she had stopped moving and talking before I’d woken up. Dex and Bentz had somehow escaped and were still on the run. No one had a firm grasp of how long it had been since the ambush, but I imagine it was a shorter time than any of them would believe. At one point, our wheezed conversation was cut off abruptly by door slam from somewhere in the basement. A few seconds of boot-steps later, a strong set of arms dragged my limp corpse out of my cell and dumped me on the floor in view of my brothers. I managed to turn my head towards Culler’s cell, but she didn’t move. “There are two more of you out there. We know that. Honestly, we don’t care.” The shrill voice sounded like a dozen razor blades dragging across my skull. I think there were three pairs of boots around me at this point. He continued; “I just wanted you all to know that, out of payment for all of your wonderful contributions to our supply-chain, we’ll be keeping you here until we find your friends, and any information you have concerning their whereabouts would be greatly appreciated.” I couldn’t look up at his face, but the sharp voice was wearing the shiniest black boots of the three that surrounded me. The polished black leather squeaked slightly on the wet ground as the boots turned sharply to exit. “Don’t worry about getting it all out at once, though.” The sentence was punctuated by another door-slam, and more boots approached from the dark hallway. “We’ve got plenty of time to talk.” Time is an interesting thing to think about when you can’t tell if it’s progressing. The blackness that started at our ambush ended in the cold concrete basement of the tombstone, coughing and bleeding, but the space between those two moments isn’t really measured in time. If you run a foot race, someone watching you could tell you that the start and finish lines are 100 yards apart, but when you’re neck and neck with your opponent, you don’t measure the distance with numbers. The distance between you and that finish line is determination, competition, and exertion. From that point, the time I spent in that basement only presents itself in my memory as the lifetimes of pain I experienced at the heels of those boots. I could tell you that I spent two years being beaten on the cold blades of rough concrete, but the image in your head would bear no resemblance to what happened to me. They never even started asking me questions. In between the redefinitions of my limits of pain, in the low points where I could almost remember what it felt like to itch, they took turns with my brothers. My world was colored by shades of agony, sung by the screams of those I lived to protect. I don’t know when Culler stopped making any noise when they came for her. Neither did they; her body might still be in that cell, as far as I remember. By the time the MPD found Bentz and Dex, I was the only of my imprisoned brothers still alive. My captors had grown bored with me; when my ability to show pain was exhausted, and they had no more of my sworn kin to rip from me, they forgot why I deserved to suffer. I had forgotten that I could. For a while, after the last of my brothers had left their bodies in the dungeon, the door slam stopped sounding like my fingers breaking. Boots would walk by my door and fade into the dark without stopping at my knees. Food appeared at my door a bit more frequently, and I could actually taste. The day before they brought Dex and Bentz in, I even stood for a while. “Brother…” Bentz said weakly as they dragged him by my cell. He wheezed through what sounded like broken ribs and a crushed windpipe, but was probably worse. He coughed, and rolled his head to look behind him. Dex looked like he’d taken two turns on whatever ride Bentz had been on; each of his joints was bent in the wrong direction, and somehow his unconscious body managed to spin as they dragged him into the cell next to Culler’s. I could tell he wasn’t going to live long enough for them to torture me with. It terrifies me that I found an upside to that situation. Bentz and Dex’s arrival reminded the MPD of their sadistic purpose in keeping me, but it had been so long since I had been their main hobby. My brothers and I had paid our debt in agony, and we no longer owed them our suffering. “Good news!” That same shiny-shod, razor-blade tone sliced open barely healed wounds. “And now that your two cohorts have joined you, you can hear it together. You’re no longer interesting enough to keep around, so it’s time for you to leave.” I refused to look at his face through the bars. I knew the look it wore, and I didn’t want to let him deliver it. Now I’m going to take the last of you. Blue gloves dragged me out of my cell. Bentz got pulled too. They didn’t bother with Dex. Pale-lit concrete snaked underground, and I was pulled deeper beneath the foundation of the Tombstone than I knew they went. I heard the click of the shiny boots behind me for every step. I hazily cleared a final doorframe, and my chauffeur dumped me in a heap in the center of a perfectly square room. They dropped Bentz next to me, equally undignified, and the four MPD lined the wall. With a leathery squeak and an audible, unspoken smirk, the door slammed. “Hey, Bentz.” I mumbled. Four rifles racked in fresh rounds from full magazines. “Hey, Cobb.” Slings and stocks shuffled as muscular arms aimed heavy weapons. I don’t remember if I flinched. The barkeep didn’t realize it was the end of the story until the dark haired patron finished his drink and stood to leave. “Wait a second,” he protested, but the stranger cut him off. “It’s your story now. Though I’d tell it with a better ending. Have the two of them escape somehow. Let him win something…” Perplexed, the barkeep pushed him further. “You said you was tellin’ this from memory.” “It was a memory, but the people it belonged to are all dead. That makes it a story now.” He collected his jacket idly. “Your story.” “So you’re a dead man, huh?” the barkeep’s skeptical nature returned as he swiped another empty glass from the storyteller’s vacant seat. The stranger’s shoulders shrugged visibly under his slim jacket. “If you know of a card game, let me know. The name’s Nolan.”
To most, the ten of us stalking a MPD caravan would have probably looked like a pack of wolves on the hunt; wild dogs circling, waiting for the perfect moment to swarm a crawling rundown junkie. Culler padded on all fours next to me, draped twice in black by her cloak and the moonless night. I could have mistaken her lithe crawl for a cloud’s shadow from mere feet, and twenty yards from us, the belching tractor-dragged convoy provided enough noise to drown out disagreement with a Horseman.
The boot-jockeys weren’t going to notice us.
“Everyone better keep their spacing. Bentz was too cocky today.” Culler spit the words at my shoulder without turning her head. Her eyes were locked on the tractor, but I could feel her mind spinning next to me.
“It’ll be fine, Culler.” I said.
“He’s getting reckless and you know it. He can’t break mission again. Not like he did today, and not with how jumpy the blues have been getting.”
“You know you told us it was absolute-silence until the charge goes?”
She shot me a familiar don’t be a jackass look through her black hood. I knew that Bentz was on the other side of the tractor, crawling in the dark next to Bester, exactly where Culler’s plan had put him. He always was. She knew it too, but Brother Bentz had made a bit too much noise when he’d placed the charge in the tractor’s engine, and despite the two extra hours I’d spent on recon making sure Bentz’s mistake hadn’t been noticed, she was still riding him. Brother Culler was unforgiving about mistakes in her plans. She didn’t appreciate my levity.
We stalked the caravan along the cracked roadway for a quarter of the night. Culler took heed of my reminder and stayed quiet as the engine rumble filled the empty night. The MPD liked to bring food and ammunition into their facilities during the light of day because they got held up the most. In the light, they could see trouble coming from farther. Night-shipments, then, were non-standard items they wanted to hide; tech-salvage; drugs; maybe some children to sell, if the Horsemen had been in an orphaning mood. Night-convoys would run without lights and have a few more gun hands running with them, and for the most part were left alone. We didn’t know what this particular tractor was hauling, and we never really did. Culler didn’t ask unnecessary questions when she took contracts for the brotherhood, and this time the “what” apparently hadn’t been important.
Whatever it was, I liked the night-hits the best. They paid better. And they missed what we took.
The paved highway narrowed to the width of two of the carts, and the eight guards widened their perimeter into the wispy grass around the road. Culler’s already silent breath halted, and a synchronized chill ran down my spine. All ten of us froze. We felt Bester’s thumb slide the safety off the detonator and press hard on the toggle. We smiled.
Now, any pickpocket will tell you that he expects his plan to go wrong constantly; expecting individual parts of a plan to fail allows the whole to remain stable. Culler’s plans were frequently so redundant that two or three brothers could easily forget every single step and have no impact on the outcome. Any contract thief will tell you that he always expects his buyer to screw him and the target to know he’s coming. Any roadway hijacker will expect his mark to be packing hidden heat. Culler’s schemes could handle any of these surprises, so when the shaped charge didn’t detonate on cue, I didn’t panic.
The next few seconds were chaotic. Floodlights erupted from the wagon trailing the tractor, turning anything within throwing distance into a glowing beacon of light. I got a nice silhouette of a new MPD heavy setting his machinegun on the railing facing me as the lights bloomed to full power. It took longer than I would have expected for the gunfire to start, maybe a few full seconds; Culler had time to shoot me a much less familiar, but equally distinguishable look.
So this is probably it, huh?
I covered my eyes with my hands, but they were already shriveled and useless. The first couple gunshots were towards our brothers on the opposite side of the road, and I pulled mightily on Culler’s tiny frame. The first bullet to tear through me went through my collarbone and splintered my shoulder blade, sending some bone fragments out my back. I think I dropped her. Once the cadence of fire picked up, I took four more shots in my legs and one in my stomach as I tried to pull Culler’s limp frame away from the small sun and it’s speedy lead rays. I think she’d been halfway through cursing Dex’s name when her neck tore open from a rifle shot. I thought she was dead, but that didn’t really matter at that point. As I blacked out, I think I tried to pull my pistol out of my jacket, but there’s nothing really definite about those last few moments.
The barkeep didn’t quite know what to say. This man had walked in, ordered his drink and sat for five hours before saying anything, and he hadn’t even told that story to anyone it particular. Now he sat quietly again, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Not exactly the usual type, either. His clothes were well-kept, and his jet black hair looked like it had been washed at some point. By looking, the barkeep had pegged his as the type to complain about his wife while nursing a beer.
“Someone been tellin’ you stories, friend?” The barkeep spoke his first words to the man. He stared, unmoving, at the bar, cradling the glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched.
“Telling stories?” His tone of voice was different now, as if he had been reading a script and suddenly was speaking out-of-character. “They’ll probably be stories when you tell them. Still memories for me.”
“You got shot five times.” The barkeeper said skeptically. As a barkeeper, he took every tale of war and woe about as seriously as he took promises to “pay the tab next time”. His job was to nod, grumble in agreement, and refill the drinks. It didn’t usually matter to anyone how true the stories were.
The steely-eyed patron seemed to disagree. He downed his drink in a single gulp and deftly unfastened his shirt, revealing a scar the size of a bottle cap on his collarbone. The barkeep knew a bullet scar when he saw one. He wondered what the mark on the other side looked like. “Hell, son, didn’t mean no disrespect. Scar like that’s worth a free drink. Bet that hurt, huh?”
The freshly poured whiskey swirled calmly in the patron’s glass until it settled, marble smooth. He buttoned his shirt again. “Nothing too bad. I can get over the little stuff.”
“So, uh, if you don’t mind me asking, what happened next?”
“…Pain, I guess.”
The blackness between the ambush and the Tombstone’s floor lasted as long as it took my shoulder to close from the rifle blast. It was dark, wet, and my body didn’t work at all; It took me a while to adjust to broken bones and clouded senses, but believe me, the pain hadn’t really started yet. Over a time I can’t really define, I learned from my brothers that two of our number had been killed instantly in the ambush. Five of my brothers laid in cells spread around the floor, including Culler, but she had stopped moving and talking before I’d woken up. Dex and Bentz had somehow escaped and were still on the run. No one had a firm grasp of how long it had been since the ambush, but I imagine it was a shorter time than any of them would believe.
At one point, our wheezed conversation was cut off abruptly by door slam from somewhere in the basement. A few seconds of boot-steps later, a strong set of arms dragged my limp corpse out of my cell and dumped me on the floor in view of my brothers. I managed to turn my head towards Culler’s cell, but she didn’t move.
“There are two more of you out there. We know that. Honestly, we don’t care.” The shrill voice sounded like a dozen razor blades dragging across my skull. I think there were three pairs of boots around me at this point. He continued; “I just wanted you all to know that, out of payment for all of your wonderful contributions to our supply-chain, we’ll be keeping you here until we find your friends, and any information you have concerning their whereabouts would be greatly appreciated.”
I couldn’t look up at his face, but the sharp voice was wearing the shiniest black boots of the three that surrounded me. The polished black leather squeaked slightly on the wet ground as the boots turned sharply to exit. “Don’t worry about getting it all out at once, though.” The sentence was punctuated by another door-slam, and more boots approached from the dark hallway. “We’ve got plenty of time to talk.”
Time is an interesting thing to think about when you can’t tell if it’s progressing. The blackness that started at our ambush ended in the cold concrete basement of the tombstone, coughing and bleeding, but the space between those two moments isn’t really measured in time. If you run a foot race, someone watching you could tell you that the start and finish lines are 100 yards apart, but when you’re neck and neck with your opponent, you don’t measure the distance with numbers. The distance between you and that finish line is determination, competition, and exertion.
From that point, the time I spent in that basement only presents itself in my memory as the lifetimes of pain I experienced at the heels of those boots. I could tell you that I spent two years being beaten on the cold blades of rough concrete, but the image in your head would bear no resemblance to what happened to me. They never even started asking me questions. In between the redefinitions of my limits of pain, in the low points where I could almost remember what it felt like to itch, they took turns with my brothers. My world was colored by shades of agony, sung by the screams of those I lived to protect. I don’t know when Culler stopped making any noise when they came for her. Neither did they; her body might still be in that cell, as far as I remember.
By the time the MPD found Bentz and Dex, I was the only of my imprisoned brothers still alive. My captors had grown bored with me; when my ability to show pain was exhausted, and they had no more of my sworn kin to rip from me, they forgot why I deserved to suffer. I had forgotten that I could. For a while, after the last of my brothers had left their bodies in the dungeon, the door slam stopped sounding like my fingers breaking. Boots would walk by my door and fade into the dark without stopping at my knees. Food appeared at my door a bit more frequently, and I could actually taste. The day before they brought Dex and Bentz in, I even stood for a while.
“Brother…” Bentz said weakly as they dragged him by my cell. He wheezed through what sounded like broken ribs and a crushed windpipe, but was probably worse. He coughed, and rolled his head to look behind him. Dex looked like he’d taken two turns on whatever ride Bentz had been on; each of his joints was bent in the wrong direction, and somehow his unconscious body managed to spin as they dragged him into the cell next to Culler’s. I could tell he wasn’t going to live long enough for them to torture me with. It terrifies me that I found an upside to that situation.
Bentz and Dex’s arrival reminded the MPD of their sadistic purpose in keeping me, but it had been so long since I had been their main hobby. My brothers and I had paid our debt in agony, and we no longer owed them our suffering.
“Good news!” That same shiny-shod, razor-blade tone sliced open barely healed wounds. “And now that your two cohorts have joined you, you can hear it together. You’re no longer interesting enough to keep around, so it’s time for you to leave.”
I refused to look at his face through the bars. I knew the look it wore, and I didn’t want to let him deliver it.
Now I’m going to take the last of you.
Blue gloves dragged me out of my cell. Bentz got pulled too. They didn’t bother with Dex. Pale-lit concrete snaked underground, and I was pulled deeper beneath the foundation of the Tombstone than I knew they went. I heard the click of the shiny boots behind me for every step. I hazily cleared a final doorframe, and my chauffeur dumped me in a heap in the center of a perfectly square room. They dropped Bentz next to me, equally undignified, and the four MPD lined the wall. With a leathery squeak and an audible, unspoken smirk, the door slammed.
“Hey, Bentz.” I mumbled.
Four rifles racked in fresh rounds from full magazines.
“Hey, Cobb.”
Slings and stocks shuffled as muscular arms aimed heavy weapons. I don’t remember if I flinched.
The barkeep didn’t realize it was the end of the story until the dark haired patron finished his drink and stood to leave. “Wait a second,” he protested, but the stranger cut him off.
“It’s your story now. Though I’d tell it with a better ending. Have the two of them escape somehow. Let him win something…”
Perplexed, the barkeep pushed him further. “You said you was tellin’ this from memory.”
“It was a memory, but the people it belonged to are all dead. That makes it a story now.” He collected his jacket idly. “Your story.”
“So you’re a dead man, huh?” the barkeep’s skeptical nature returned as he swiped another empty glass from the storyteller’s vacant seat.
The stranger’s shoulders shrugged visibly under his slim jacket. “If you know of a card game, let me know. The name’s Nolan.”